The Tyrant T-Rex
Page-Flippers Book #1 of 4 total THE TYRANT T-REX K.J. Nace- author- 2019 Kenneth N.- cover illustrator- 2019 -When Mark accidentally breaks his favorite T-Rex figure, he finds himself in a strange, but similar world where the action figures have become real themselves! My name is Mark Ringlet. I am twelve, and my younger brother, Jerry, is only nine. My parents say that we are like best friends, but I don’t know about that. I’m into dinosaurs and drawing the coolest-looking monsters and other strange creatures that I can dream up. But Jerry said that he has no interest whatsoever in dinosaurs because he thinks that they weren’t real to begin with. So I don’t know how anyone could think that we are friends at all. We have nothing in common! All he cares about is his lame comic books, and he only likes the old Archie comics, which he thinks are hilarious. I try to understand them, but they are kind of lame, in my opinion. So it is best when he is in his own room minding his own business, and I am in mine. I just wish Mom would stop trying to make us be “pals” or whatever she calls it. Anyway, this story is mostly about me, and not Jerry, but I had to include in him because he comes into the story a short while later. One day, I was in my awesome room looking at my cool dinosaur action figures, and Mom just barges in and asks me to take the trash out for her. I sigh, but reluctantly agree to do it. After I finally finish that dumb chore, I’m drenched in sweat because it just had to be the hottest day in the summer! I slink back into my room, and turn my oscillating fan on to 3-Speed. After about five minutes, I’m back to where I started. I go back over to my display table with my dinosaur figures, and I pull off the orange one with the dome-head and the spikes behind the skull. That one is called Stygimoloch (stigh-ee-moe-lock), and it means “the demon from the Styx River”, which I guess is someplace in China where the paleontologists first discovered it. It belonged to the family of, get this, the pachycephalosaurs, or the thick-headed lizards, since they have a dome of solid bone on their heads for ramming into one another, like a modern-day mountain goat. I chuckle to myself when I try to explain to my brother the meanings of some of my dinosaurs which sort of peak his interests. When I say it was a “thick-headed lizard”, I just think about how thick-headed he can be- most of the time! Him and his dumb comics just about drive me crazy! Anyway, I pick up the Stygimoloch, and the Pachycephalosaurus, and take them down to my space in the basement, next to my large drawing desk. Then I go back up to my room, and take the Triceratops, the Pachyrhinosaurus, and the Nasutoceratops down to the same table. If you didn’t already know by now, the ceratopsians, or the horned dinosaurs, are also members of a larger family which contains the pachycephalosaurs. They are known as the Marginocephalians (marge-in-no-seph-aliens), or the group of plant-eating dinosaurs that either walked on 2 or 4 legs, and had sharp beaks, and decorative or display features adorning their skulls. It's a pretty large group, but the descriptions only match those two families. I now have all five of my Marginocephalians in one spot, and I divide them up into the two families. Then, my mom comes downstairs and asks if I finished collecting the trash yet, and I say yes. She then goes into the washing room, and comes back out a moment later with a large basket of laundry. I see her struggling, and I volunteer to help her by bringing it up and putting it on the dining room table so she can begin folding them. She thanked me, and then asked what I was “up to”, and I told her that I was sorting out my dinosaur figures on my desk, and that was all. That seemed to make her content. So I scurried back to my room, and brought out the larger, brown Tyrannosaurus rex figure to fight with the ceratopsians. I race back down the stairs, but I trip, and the T-Rex figure is still clutched in my hands. As I start to descend, I see the toy begin to snap into pieces as it crashes into the concrete steps. I get up, after falling down the stairs, and I discover that only the head broke off, and one of the small arms. I gather up the arm and the head, and then walk carefully over to the desk with the other dinosaurs, and place them down on the table. I try to put the head back on, but the small mechanism that makes it connect was snapped off from the impact. I see that the little peg is still lodged in the base of the T-Rex’s head. I then pick up the puny little arm, and try to see if I can reattach it somehow, and it snaps back in easily. Well, now it’s not much of a T-Rex toy without the famous head, so I began to look for a box to put the pieces in. I found one by the board game shelf, and emptied the miscellaneous game pieces onto the shelf. I then placed the dinosaur’s decapitated body and his head into the box, and place it up onto a high shelf. I wonder if I can convince my mom to buy me a new one since my old one was broken. But then, I hesitated, because I knew she didn’t want me to spend any more money until I found a summer job. So now I have no T-Rex to play with, so it’s a bummer. I then gather up the other dinosaurs into my arms, and carefully make my way up the stairs, and into my room. I place the dinosaurs back onto their original spots, and then turn on my TV. I don’t really watch live TV at all anymore, because (1)- There’s not much going on, like movies I’m interested in, and (2)- There are SO many commercials, and they take forever! I have a very large and extensive collection of DVDs and Blu-ray movies to entertain myself with. I actually have over 60 films just on Blu-ray. Now, Blu-ray is a much better alternative to watching home movies than on DVD. It has 6x the audio and video quality than the older format, and I just can’t stand watching much on DVD anymore. I might be spoiled, but hey, I have a 32 inch flat-screen HDTV, and I want to have it live up to its full potential. I pull out my Jurassic Park collection on Blu-ray, and put in the newest film, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. After I skip to the main menus, I adjust the audio to English DTS Master Audio 7.1, and the subtitles to None. Then I go to the Chapter selection, and start at the first chapter. The movie begins, and I then turned off the lights, and sat back in my reclining chair. After I finished the film, I went to the Blu-ray main menu, and ejected the disc. I then placed it carefully back into the collection case, and then I put the case back in its spot. The room falls into silence, and then I heard a loud thud sound coming from the basement. I opened the door to my room, and went downstairs to see where the noise came from. I went over to my drawing desk, and saw that all of my pencils and pens were strewn across the floor by the desk. Then, I saw that the box that I put the broken T-Rex into is on the floor under the drawing desk. The box is upside-down, and I lift it up, but a strange white glow is emitting from under the box. Then, the box literally flies off the broken figure, and lands with a soft piff onto the large, yellow couch in the basement. I look down at the bright, white glow, but it has vanished, along with the T-Rex figure! I gasped as I saw that there was a long, white scratch on the soft carpet. I bent down to touch it, and my hand felt tingly, and then it really hurt. I looked at the back of my hand, and saw a long, white scratch on it, just like on the floor. It didn’t hurt for long, and I then touched it, but I felt like I was being pulled into the cut on my hand. After about five seconds, I had vanished completely into the scratch on my hand, and landed on my back in the middle of nowhere! I got up, and realized I was in the woods in my own backyard, and I saw my green turtle sandbox. I can also see my house with the brown-shingled roof. I try to walk out of the woods, but I soon found that there is a sort of clear, invisible force-field keeping me inside the woods. I then heard a loud sound, and turned quickly to see what made it. It was the Tyrannosaurus rex action figure with the broken head! Except this one had his head on. And he was over 40-feet long! He also was about 15-feet tall, and towered over me. His feet were huge, and those claws were mind-blowing. Its front arms were its only weak feature, but they still had sharp claws as well. It then utters a deep roar, and completely startled me. It was SO loud! I mean I thought the T-Rex could roar loud, but not this loud. Frozen, I stagger back, and realize that the dinosaur has its eyes on me. I turned around and ran toward the edge of the woods, but I then remembered that there was an invisible shield at the edge! What could I do now to escape from this monster? I looked back over my shoulder, and saw that the T-Rex had lost interest in me. I stopped to catch my breath, and then heard a strange, bellowing sound, like the noise a rhinoceros would make. I saw that now there were 2 huge dinosaurs. Alongside the t''yrannosaur'', I spot a large ceratopsian that is blue-gray in color, with red markings on its back. It looked similar to Triceratops, except its horns were even longer! I recognize it as one of my c''eratopsian'' action figures from my collection in my room. It's one I recently purchased from Wal-Mart. It was called the Nasutoceratops. This dinosaur has no nasal horn, but instead two long horns protruding from its brows, and a longer neck frill than Triceratops had. I think it means something like "long bull-horned face". Anyway, these two monster-sized action figures battled it out. I saw the T-Rex open its huge jaws to bite at the ceratopsian, but the prey's neck frill blocked its attack. Then, the Nasutoceratops lunched forward, and thrust its long horns into the belly of the T-Rex, and the predator yelped in agony. Then, the ceratopsian charged off into the woods. The tyrannosaur took a lumbering step toward me, but then it fell down onto its side from its wounds. The sound it made as it crashed down into the thick woods was deafening! I wondered if it was dead, but instead, I made my way through the forest looking for some way out. Who knows what other dinosaurs were in here with me. I had a ton of different dinosaur figures, and most of them were big carnivores. Why didn't the toy company make enough herbivorous dinosaurs? Then, another thought lingered into my mind. I had also recently gotten the new Indominus Rex figure, and it was based off of the huge carnivorous hybrid monster in one of the newer Jurassic Park movies. What if that one is here, too? And even worse, it can camouflage, so it could be anywhere! I suddenly wished that I had collected stiffed animals or something instead of these murderous beasts! I try to make a list in my head of all of the herbivorous dinosaur figures I had. Let's see: Stygimoloch, Pachycephalosaurus, Triceratops, Pachyrhinosaurus, Parasaurolophus, Stegosaurus, and the Nasutoceratops, which I already saw. Now, for a list of all of the carnivorous ones. Oh boy, this could be bad. Let's see now: Tyrannosaurus rex (T-Rex), the Indominus Rex (which I really did NOT want to see!), the Indoraptor (also one I would be happy not to see- and I had 2 of them- great!), Allosaurus (both male and female ones), Concavenator, Ceratosaurus, Velociraptor (2 also), Gallimimus (not too much of a threat), Baryonyx, and (thankfully) Metriacanthosaurus. I then heard a rustling sound, and quickly turned around to see what made the noise. But then, the sounds stopped. I turn back around, and then thank my lucky stars that I did not yet have the new Spinosaurus figure yet. After I get out of this mess, will I even want to get it? Spinosaurus was larger and stronger than a T-Rex, and that one back there was really scary. The rustling sound comes again, but this time, it was further away. To be continued...